I enjoy writing, It’s one of the ways I work things out. If something is bothering me, a thought is stuck, nagging or simply needs exploring further, writing is a way I draw that out. Literally – it often takes me weeks or months to write something (mainly on my phone during my commute, which is even less of my time in the world of hybrid work*). It’s also been a form of creative outlet for some time. The day after I graduated from university, my band’s musical equipment was in London following a gig and I was at a loose end, so I got myself a notepad and pen from the local Tesco and started to write a novel. Four years and much scribbling later, I had a confused, clunky, angry young man type novel. It was terrible, I mean I think about it now and actually cringe, but I wrote it, and I had realised that I enjoyed the challenge of writing it, of finding out what happened to the characters, trying to push them in one direction and finding them sometimes choose something else. In case anyone is in any doubt, I am not by any measure a successful writer of fiction, over the years I have written a few short stories of which I’m proud, screenplays for a few (unmade) films and a few more (unmade) television series, a joint novel (with some friends) that became the first interactive online platform I ever built and endless finished and (mostly) half finished blog posts. 

Why am I writing about this here, now? Why should you care about this catalogue of my ramblings? I guess I’m mentioning this because each of those ‘products’ was the result of an idea that I had at the time, that I wanted to explore as a story or an essay or sometimes even (and you’re definitely never going to see this anywhere) poetry. I’m not a professional writer, so I don’t wake up on Monday thinking “I have to write something by Friday,” and I am in awe of people who can do that. However, that means I don’t necessarily always have to be writing and whilst I usually have several pieces or projects on the go at any one time, I don’t have any compulsion to finish any of them beyond my own desire for completion or resolution. This presents something of a problem for this blog. The first post came about as a result of a ‘random’ event and as it was coming to fruition it felt like something I wanted to share more broadly in the context of my work life (it is the first time I have ever referenced my job title in a blog post). As it was too long to post directly to LinkedIn, I created this blog for it. So now I have this blog, and I’ve linked to it from LinkedIn, and whether in my head or in ‘reality’ there is an expectation that I should create more content for it. I am now, for want of a better phrase, a LinkedIn content creator. And this is my ‘difficult second album’ of a blog post. Like all good difficult second albums, it will probably be ponderous, meandering, overblown and conceptually overwrought. But hey ho, you’re here now, and so am I…

I’ve never had a Facebook account. Years ago my small press had a Facebook account that my business partner set up and I logged into it once. However, faced with a confusing array of stuff, none of which seemed interesting, relevant or desirable, I quickly logged out. I think I’d expected an exciting and dynamic portal to the world, so when I got a scrappy and confused website I was understandably disappointed. That was my only time on Facebook. I was on Twitter for a while and probably overindulged during the pandemic, but King Elon has cured me of that particular addiction (I was an early abandoner). What I’m saying is I’m only loosely versed in the ‘norms’ of social media, in fact my wife (a consummate Instagram user) regularly tells me I’m rubbish at the internet. “How can you work in tech and be so rubbish at the internet?” she will ask if she has to watch me navigate anything online. Of course I would argue that I am not rubbish at the internet, I just use it differently. I try to use it my way rather than it making me use it its way. And fundamentally, that is what most social media is: a way for a company to define how they think you should use the internet. A few years ago Facebook tried to take this to its logical endpoint with Facebook Free Basics, which was released in developing markets along with (a certain amount of) free internet access. This meant that for many millions of people especially in India and Africa, their only interaction with the internet was through Facebook. For them Facebook was the World Wide Web. Of course one of the unintended consequences of this is that the markets where Facebook Free Basics was available (it isn’t anymore) are the markets where some of the more arcane and Byzantine (mis)uses of Facebook are still most prevalent. In these markets, where Facebook wanted to define how the internet works for entire populations, are, more than anywhere else, where users bent Facebook to their will and made it do what they wanted. I love this story because it shows how people find a way to make technology do what they want despite what that technology’s creators might try to dictate. Of course those of us who have easy access to the internet rarely think about how we might get technology to do something different from what we’re told it should do. If we want to do something, there is probably an app for it. If we want to get food we use Deliveroo, if we want to transfer files we use Dropbox or if we want to … we use social media. I think possibly my problem with social media is I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do with it. I mean it’s for entertainment right? Or something. My limited interactions with social media suggest that they are variously for picking fights with strangers, feeling insecure about your image/lifestyle/diet or sharing nonsense memes (which is of course the only real use for 70% of the internet). Each of the various platforms require that we invest our time, thoughts and creativity in the manner proscribed in order to achieve the full experience of that platform. I am not saying that people don’t get anything positive out of social media, but they certainly have to put the right thing in, it’s not a free ride or a blank canvass. If you’re on Instagram for example, you need to carefully curate your life’s images and engage with the images/reels/whatever of your peers to make sure the algorithm has enough content to slosh around to keep everyone engaged. You’re creating the content you want to see (and hopefully seeing content you want that others have created)  but you shouldn’t kid yourself that you’re doing it on your terms. You are told the content you want to see. 

LinkedIn is really the only social media I am on. And it is social media. I think people like me used to excuse LinkedIn as a kind of CV storage/job posting site, but it is clear these days that it is more social media than anything else, not least when someone posts something they found on TikTok and tries to make some sort of point about being your true self at work, how hard work pays off or whatever other cod motivational guff they think will get the most likes. And why not? This is after all the point of social media isn’t it, to generate content and get rewarded with likes. Except I can’t let go of the career-y aspect of LinkedIn. When people mentioned my last post I sort of excused it as “something you have to do when you get to this stage in your career.”  Except of course it can’t always have been. Sure there are professions and areas of professions where people have always written articles or essays or spoken at conferences, but not where they have continually written about their work, industry or career. In order to keep up with this level of output a whole new industry of content production has sprung up, and I’m afraid this appears to favour quantity over quality, and likes above all else. I can see how this works in the ‘regular’ social networks, where the objective is to simply get as much attention as possible, but there is always the other consideration with LinkedIn. What if you apply for a job, your prospective employer looks at your LinkedIn feed and concludes that you can’t be getting much work done if you’re spending so much of your time hunting likes and links? If you’re in marketing or recruitment I guess this will never happen because it is your job to get peoples’ attention on LinkedIn and if that means flooding it with spammy content, then so be it. These days that inevitably means some people turn to generative AI to create the content they want. And this is where I start to really wonder what the point is. I suspect that no one looks at a clickbait/likebait post and thinks better of the person who posted it afterwards. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m just a curmudgeonly old man (slightly) before my time, but I don’t think so. For me it’s about making good use of the resources available and that includes time, mine and others’. I guess I can save time using AI to generate a post for me, but if it’s total garbage, it’s just wasting other people’s time. Also AI is hardly resource efficient, if I’ve traded a small amount of my time for a load of unnecessary server power to produce something that few people, if any, are going to find useful or valuable, I’m not going to feel great about it. I can’t be alone in that. Does anyone get a deep sense of satisfaction from using a shortcut to produce something that no one is ever going to thank them for? 

Of course there are exceptions. A story about a generative AI powered job application bot amused me almost as much as it depressed me. Recruiters have been using AI tools to sift through job applications for years, looking for key words and phrases and ruthlessly rejecting any missing the correct terms. Indeed services promising to optimise your CV to pass these triage bots have existed for almost as long, alongside instructions how to be the candidate the bot is looking for. Basically in the jobs market we have been trying to do what the machine expects us to do for a while, so it’s only right and proper that we just get a machine to do it for us. But now the job application writing machine is talking to the job application reviewing machine and the only influence a human can exert is whether they can afford a better machine. Not exactly a measure of capability to do a job, but I guess just a reflection of how the rest of society works: those with the cash can get ahead. And whilst I like the sentiment of “if you’re going to make me do what the machine wants, I’ll just get a machine to do it,” I struggle to see the value of a machine generating loads of content, burning masses of energy, just so another machine can consume it. I’m all for machines automating away the drudgery, but so far they’re only automating away the drudgery that they created in the first place. Like the machines created the problems in order to solve them. 

On LinkedIn I would expect that this kind of content creation could have real world consequences. There seems to have been a recent uptick in people cross-posting political content from other social networks, usually reflecting what they believe to be popular opinion. I would caution against this approach, remembering that ‘popular opinion’ is rarely even the opinion of an outright majority of people, let alone all of them. Also opinions change but social media feeds are forever. You might delete an old post when it no longer fits the prevailing mood, but your connections may well remember it. Even if you do stick to ‘work’ related topics there is a risk of over sharing. Personally if I’d become aware of someone because they were regularly spamming my feed on LinkedIn, I would think twice about offering them a job. What does it say about someone’s likely attitude to work if they’re willing to take the easy option with their personal brand and sling out any old crap? “But,” you say, “you’re writing this long and rambling missive. Isn’t this just mass content creation?” I guess  you could look at it like that, but I have edited this, it isn’t just a brain dump. It was to start with, but I wrote bits and came back and changed bits and added other bits. As I said I use writing to work things out, it is a process of arranging and rearranging thoughts and ideas until they form a cohesive whole, until they tell me or others something useful about the world we live in. I like a difficult second album because it shows all the parts of the process the artist wanted to share. I don’t like deluxe editions because they show you all the bits of the thought process the artist decided not to share. Why do I want to hear the version of a song the artist didn’t want me to hear? The one where the baseline didn’t quite work or the extra percussion wasn’t quite vibing? Yeah it’s more, but it doesn’t add anything to the album, in fact for me it actively takes away from it by presenting slightly grating versions of pieces of music I really like in their finished form. I’m sure for some people there’s a sense that all that extra chaff, all those outtakes gets you closer to the artist, to their real essence, their process and who they are/were as a person. To me it seems like a particularly fruitless form of voyeurism. I love much of the music of David Bowie, but I don’t want to get closer to who he was as a person, not least because I’d have to confront the issues of underage sex. So I’m happy to just have the finished product. 

I also said I’m writing this out of some sense of obligation, a sense that this is the sort of thing people in my position do, but also what is expected from the platform, that I must create more. Always more. And whilst it started out with social media ’content’, it appears to have spread to everything else. I can’t help but feel that modern approaches to technology are driven by a more is better approach. I have this made up vision of the birth of modern machine learning, where an engineer building a projection model of market performance thinks “this programme doesn’t quite work, I could try and finesse it, or I could just run it a thousand times and take an average of the crappy answers.” Obviously the programme gets the right answer enough times, the engineer makes a ton of cash (or his company does) and modern machine learning is born. This is clearly not what actually happened, but it’s also probably not a million miles off. 

The blockchain was another fine example of someone going “this database is great, but it’s not wasting enough energy sat here on one computer, what I really need to do is spread it out across many computers around the world and invent a complex system for validating each addition to the table so that it really starts burning through the megawatts.” 

With all these systems, the ‘value’ seems to be derived entirely from the volume of transactions. A single person can write an email, but if a thousand servers can do it instead that is somehow progress. I could write one thing a month on social media that some people will read, but if I get 10,000 servers to write 10 things a month that 20 other machines will read and automatically comment on then I have won at the internet apparently. As I’ve already said, I’m not good at using the internet the way it was meant to be used and in this case I am entirely OK with that. I’m not going to say I don’t get any validation from seeing people like my posts, but I’m not sure I would get more validation if I had more posts or more likes. The sense of achievement I get from completing a piece of writing that feels genuinely complete to me is arguably greater or at least I think adds weight to any subsequent likes. That my thoughts written down may be potentially insightful to others gives those words value to me. If I was to post things that I didn’t feel I’d put any effort into, I’d probably feel guilty about cheating people. 

At this point I should probably deal with the obvious accusation, that I’m an AI hater. This is not true, I am happy to use AI and machine learning where appropriate, I’m just not convinced I’d get any satisfaction out of using generative AI to shortcut a process that I find personally rewarding and useful. I’m all for AI taking the drudgery out of work, but when it replaces the processes by which we gain an understanding of the world (ie learning) then we don’t gain that knowledge and insight. As I’ve said before, AI can only ‘learn’ from human experience, so if we limit our experience and understanding we will very quickly run out of innovation. If we don’t understand processes and conventions, we can’t hope to improve them and we can’t hope to improve ourselves (or our AI tools). 

There is another idea around at the moment that questioning the use of generative AI is in some way ableist. That generative AI helps those who find writing hard for any number of reasons, perhaps they have dyslexia or English is not their first language. In such cases, there is a reasonable argument for the use of generative AI powered assistants to help with creating the right structures for letters or emails or blog posts or whatever. But this is not how most generative AI is marketed. We are told that we simply need to input our ideas and the AI will generate a cohesive document for us. That’s not helping someone write a document, my phone can pretty much do that already, that’s doing their homework for them. With the exception of the initial ideas (which could be very minimal) the finished product could not represent the ‘author’ at all, it will represent the most common opinions on the subject, which if you’re trying to represent a minority isn’t really useful. If your concern is giving voice to disadvantaged people, then giving them a voice that has been constructed from the average of all recorded** human experience isn’t giving them their own voice, it’s giving them someone else’s. By definition, the voice of the majority can never represent a minority. We have viewed wearing mass produced fashion as a statement of individuality for many years, I guess we’ve always been the same with mass produced opinion. But at least before we chose it ourselves, the automation of content creation (which is at least superficially about expressing your opinion) allows us to delegate even that responsibility. 

I guess this should be the point that I offer my pithy and insightful list of key takeaways, the ones that I can show in the LinkedIn summary of this post. It should probably be something about the authenticity of my own voice and my own experience, which is true, but not exactly original. It could be about the fact that there is no substitute for doing the work yourself, which feels equally platitudinous. Maybe the only key takeaway is the depressing fact that I can write a few thousand words only to end up at a set of anodyne cliches. Then again, that’s what the platform wants, and whether we like it or not we live to serve a platform these days, even in our careers. But that doesn’t mean we have to do it exactly the way the platform wants. There is an expensive, inefficient, impersonal way of doing many things that means we can do more with less satisfaction, or there is a less costly, more efficient*** way that will give us more satisfaction. I will be favouring personal satisfaction over mass production because an approach to work should also include work-life balance. Work-life balance isn’t just about the time you get to spend at work verses the time you spend at home, it’s also about the level of enrichment your work should feed back into your life, such as a sense of satisfaction at having accomplished a challenging task. That’s what I get from writing in whatever form it takes, and as long as it takes, which in the case of this blog can be quite a while.

*not a complaint

**English speaking

***I didn’t say faster, because faster isn’t the same thing as efficient. A basic premise we seem to easily forget. “More haste less speed” isn’t exactly a new phrase.